Tag Archives | murders

Recently I came across a letter that Charlie Manson had written from prison. The story of how this happened is a good one, but would best be told in private. In a moment of weakness, or brilliance, depending on your point of view, I traded it for two ounces of weed. This relative good fortune put Manson back in my consciousness and led me to buy Jeff Guin’s fabulous book on Manson, which in turn made me wonder, “Just where are all these freaks now?”

It has been 45 years or so since this little, opportunistic sociopath charmed and bedeviled a cadre of followers into doing some really bad things. Here is what they are up to today.

Check out WIRED’s Danger Room blog for a story about Daryl Johnson, a former analyst for the Department of Homeland Security whose analysis about the threat of domestic right-wing extremism eventually cost him his job:

[Daryl] Johnson’s career took an unexpected turn in 2009, when an analysis he wrote on the rise of “Right-Wing Extremism” sparked a political controversy. Under pressure from conservatives, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) repudiated Johnson’s paper — an especially bitter pill for him to swallow now that Wade Michael Page, a suspected white supremacist, killed at least six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. For Johnson, the shooting was a reminder that the government’s counterterrorism efforts are almost exclusively focused on al-Qaida, even as non-Islamist groups threaten Americans domestically.

“DHS is scoffing at the mission of doing domestic counterterrorism, as is Congress,” Johnson tells Danger Room. “There’ve been no hearings about the rising white supremacist threat, but there’s been a long list of attacks over the last few years.

Scarcely days after James Holmes’ horrific movie theater massacre, the Maine State Police have arrested a man who they claim is a wannabe copycat killer.

Forty-nine year-old Timothy Courtois of Biddeford, ME was stopped and arrested at 10 AM Sunday morning when police clocked him driving at 112 MPH on the Maine turnpike. Courtois’ vehicle contained an arsenal of firearms and clippings about the Aurora, CO massacre. The man volunteered that he had attended a screening of the Dark Knight Rises the previous night and was on the way to New Hampshire to murder a former employer when he was arrested. Courtois also stated that he had carried his pistol into the theater, but according to authorities, he did not say he had planned on harming his fellow patrons:

“He didn’t speak to any intent to harm people [at the theater], but I’m sure a lot of this is going to continue to come out” as agencies including the state police, FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives continue their investigations, Maine State Police Lt.

The bodies in Aurora, Colorado weren’t even cold before the inevitable conspiracy theories began to propagate in the bacterial petri dish that is the internet. While most people are content to let the investigation into the Dark Knight Rises murder spree evolve under the auspices of local and federal law enforcement, there exists a fringe for whom no amount of physical distance from, or baseless conjecture about, a national tragedy is too far to not support unlikely theories of United Nations false-flag attacks and other tinfoil cap speculations.
The current conspiracy du jour is that James Holmes’ attack on a packed audience watching a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises was in actuality an atrocity planned in advance by elements within the federal government and/or the United Nations. Those advocating this claim are pointing to several shaky bits of “evidence” that are in actuality nothing of the sort. This isn’t surprising, though: it costs practically nothing to make baseless accusations under the guise of “just asking questions”, and there’s much to be gained by doing so in terms of attention and notoriety. (Just ask Glenn Beck.)